What’s Cooking for BreakingBad’s Final Season? A Big Batch of Crazy

Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston, center, and show creator Vince Gilligan, right, told the Comic-Con crowd that they have wicked plans for Season 5.Photos: Jason Strykowski/Wired

SAN DIEGO — A fake baby, a Xena costume, two Tyvek suits, seven actors, one producer and plenty of secrets. That’s the roll call for Friday’s Comic-Con International preview of Breaking Bad’s final season.

The crew has just over a dozen episodes remaining to complete antihero Walter White’s descent (ascent?) from kindly chemistry teacher to hardened meth lord. And, if the explosive (sorry) end of Season 4 surprised viewers by showing the unscrupulous side of Walter White, in Season 5 the character will prove even less compromising.

“He’s found a new power,” said Emmy-winning actor Bryan Cranston of his character, who has transformed from a desperate cancer survivor into a stone-cold killer on one of television’s most gripping dramas. “And, it’s his ego — he’s got this drive to be the best, he feels like he just beat Boris Spassky in a chess match.”

The panel kicked off with a full-length trailer, which you can see below. The clip opens with two sedans racing across the high desert and pausing in a swirl of dust. Out pop Jesse and Walter from one car and Mike from the other. Mike points a gun squarely at Walt only to have Jesse block his shot. Jesse claims that Walt has something useful and needs to live.

Breaking Bad cast members onstage at Comic-Con International.

From there, the trailer becomes a fast-paced blur of Walt and Jesse gearing up to cook again. “There’s a market to be filled,” says Walter. “There’s gold in the streets.”

Walter’s decisions, though, don’t look so popular with his wife Skyler, who shares a terrifying embrace with him. He appears to have her in the grips of fear. Mike, on the other hand, gives Walter a stern warning: “You’re a ticking time bomb and I have no intention of being in the room when you go off.”

All this, and Jesse with guns.

When called to the Comic-Con stage, Paul and Cranston opted to leave the firearms at home in favor of a plastic baby in a Tyvek suit (to complement their own lab-inspired gear) and a bag of (presumably fake) meth they handed to panel moderator Mike Schneider. They stripped off their bright yellow jumpsuits for the discussion, only to hurl them at the audience at the end of the panel. Norris, who entered in a Xena costume and spent several minutes fondling his brassiere, left his costume on for the entire presentation.

The cast kept a tight lid on details about Breaking Bad’s final season, which will be split into two halves, the first of which begins Sunday on AMC. So tight, in fact, that Banks said, “Vince gave me a whole list of things I can’t talk about.”

Gilligan did let loose a few stray facts, though. At least one former associate of murdered drug kingpin Gus Fring — Lydia, played by Laura Fraser — will cause problems for Walt. Fring’s foreign investors will challenge Walt’s reign as king and “open the world a little bit and take us all the way to Hanover, Germany, in the second episode,” said Gilligan. (Fans of the show will remember that a mysterious German company manufactured a key piece of the mega lab where Walter and Jesse produce their potent meth.)

Paul described the final season as “just eerie — it’s creepy.” He likened the upcoming shows to “Crawl Space,” a Season 4 episode in which Walter nearly suffers a mental breakdown while trying to recover his hidden cash.

Gilligan also promised humor in Season 5 — and dangled the possibility that the illness that drove Walter to become a drug baron might return to the fore.

“There’s this weird duality to this season,” Gilligan said. “There’s this strange sort of exhilaration that you feel,” adding that Walter’s success in the drug biz may not be long-lived: “His cancer may soon be back. We have definitely not forgotten — Walt does indeed have cancer.”

Gilligan reassured the crowd that all the answers are coming soon and that everything will be revealed over the final 16 episodes. There will even be some favorites returning to wrap up long-building arcs. Gray Matter Technologies, the company essential in providing Walt’s first cover-up for his extracurricular meth manufacturing, for instance, will resurface in the final season.

Tensions will also rise between Walter and Skyler, whose attempt to launder her husband’s money immediately went awry. “When she stumbles upon the fact that Walt is a drug dealer,” said Gunn, “that is the hammer that drops on her so hard that I don’t think that’s a corner that she can still turn.”

Walter may also still have his relentless brother-in-law Hank chasing him. “We artfully avoided Hank catching him — I don’t think we pushed that too far,” said Norris, who plays the former DEA agent. “It would be ridiculous for him (Hank) to think that Walt is Heisenberg … but he’s not done looking and that’s something he will have to deal with.”

Gilligan promised that secrets would be revealed almost immediately when the show’s final season kicks in Sunday, and that he will fulfill his intention of completely transforming a humble chemistry teacher into a drug kingpin.

“He (Walter) does something this season that I, as the first viewer of this show, I would lose sympathy,” Gilligan said.

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